Posted
by
timothyon Sunday September 26, 2010 @06:04PM
from the cron-job-perhaps? dept.

wirelessdreamer writes "I use a bank in the US that will only allow me to download transaction history in CSV for the previous three months. I have a hard time remembering to pull my transaction history down every three months, and would gladly jump ship to another bank if there is one that lets me download, say three years' worth of transaction history as one of the standard services. Then I can import my data into MySQL and run some reports on it, which is all I'm looking for." What banks out there do the best job at providing users with simple, downloadable data?

Depends on how the bank does authentication.But yes, if the bank is insecure enough that you can have a script log in for you with no human actions, its insecure enough that its vulnerable to phishing attempts.

But yes, if the bank is insecure enough that you can have a script log in for you with no human actions, its insecure enough that its vulnerable to phishing attempts.

Um... not at all. Phishing is not an attempt to crack the bank's security. Phishing is an attempt to lure the user into divulging the credentials by imitating the bank. First of all, a script will have the bank's true URL hard coded into it, so it can never be distracted by fakes. Second, a script initiates the conversation whereas a phishing attack is initiated by the phisher, so the script will never even see a phishing attempt. Third, a script will verify that it has a secure connection each and every time, whereas a person won't.

All in all, using a script will be more secure than logging in manually.

Good thing about a credit union that services techies (the old DEC crowd). It's funny to see HP kit in the offices, I'd still love to see VT300-VT400's from days past.
Now DFCU, 'splain to me again why you closed down the Alpharetta branch??!!!
Personally, I use mint.com to manage historical transactions.

I am very happy with Patelco CU (also a tech/comms credit union). Full transaction history and they doesn't try to rob me at every opportunity! It's almost like open source banks!.... almost. Maybe we could start a credit union for open source developers?

I think the rule of thumb is most banks offer a few months' worth of records. My Canadian bank offers 3 months worth of records on line as well. I don't know what the practice is with other banks. But mine offers further records if I go to the branch and pay for the records. You may find that you will also need to pay for transaction records. These records may or may not be available on-line and you may only be able to get them at a branch.

Now, if you have enough money in your account (you're of sufficient high net worth) they may be able to give you better service. Then again, you wouldn't be posting the question on/. you'd already have a banking officer doing it for you!

Now, if you have enough money in your account (you're of sufficient high net worth) they may be able to give you better service.

You wouldn't need to ask your bank for records, your personal accountant would already have collected all that information, prepared whichever reports you had wanted
and uploaded everything to your private server.

Given that overdraft and other such fees are a substantial part of a bank's income, you'd think they would consider such accounts to be "high net worth"... for the bank's own net worth that is, and provide them good service for things like transaction reports.

Oh wait... if they provided transaction reports, many of these account holders would not be overdrawing. N/M

No reality is that THEY get to "invest" $1M+ of your money (typically at 4% return) to be "high net worth".
Having $10M invested at a reasonable return (say 7% - meaning somewhere ELSE!) doesn't count...

Given that overdraft and other such fees are a substantial part of a bank's income, you'd think they would consider such accounts to be "high net worth"... for the bank's own net worth that is, and provide them good service for things like transaction reports.

Oh wait... if they provided transaction reports, many of these account holders would not be overdrawing. N/M

I don't like banks either (particularly because of the fractional reserve system) but I don't understand your viewpoint here. I'll provide background information to explain.

I keep my own transaction records. Banks are run by humans who can and do make mistakes despite the best of intentions; with no records of my own I'd have a really hard time disputing such a mistake. That's one reason. Another reason is that no one cares about managing my money as much as I do, nor would it be reasonable to expect otherwise. A third reason is that I don't like to needlessly be dependent on someone else to provide important information that can directly impact my life when it's something I can easily take care of myself.

Incidentally, I refuse to carry a debit card and instead I use credit cards as charge cards. They are a bad way to get a loan but they are a wonderful form of payment. The bottom line is that this greatly simplifies my checking account statements from my bank, making my record-keeping trivial.

Now to the main point. There is one and only one event that can possibly cause an overdraft: spending more money than you have placed in your account. How is that the fault of the bank? Why is it their job to make sure you are responsible and do not financially overextend yourself? Is it a problem for you that a fee is attached to an event that shouldn't happen in the first place?

I would not be shocked or amazed in the slightest, no not even a bit, to learn that the people who can't be bothered to keep their own records are the same people who create most overdrafts. They clearly think managing their money is someone else's job. That might leave them open to problems that more responsible adults would have foreseen and been able to prevent or at least mitigate. To me that is simple cause-and-effect and nothing more.

To reiterate, I don't like banks. It'd be petty to let that bias my reasoning, though in this case that isn't even a temptation. Do you know why? Because there's something I like even less than banks, and that's the decline of personal responsibility and the whole victim mentality that is rooted in it.

I think the rule of thumb is most banks offer a few months' worth of records. My Canadian bank offers 3 months worth of records on line as well.

May be in Canada, in the US most of the larger banks (even the really bad ones) offer at least one year of downloadable records. I have a relative in Europe, and one of his banks gives him access to download up-to six years of records!!! Granted, six years is a bit much, but 3 months is really low in my opinion.

I've mostly used credit unions, not actual banks, but I've had accounts in Canada and the US. If there's a history limit on either of them, I've never encountered it (and I have gone back for years before).

It surprises me that there's any question of this at the "real" banks.

Even better would be a way to automatically download it and import it. If the file is at a constant URL, you should be able to use a little $scripting_lang and a little creativity to take care of this. If the URL is randomized or obfuscated, you might have a bit more fun with it.

Of course microsoft money, quicken, etc do that so I guess it's not considered bad after all.

Microsoft money, quicken...those are windows programs. I can see why you'd think storing login credentials is a bad idea.

I actually have a cron job that uses CURL to connect to my bank, figure out which question they ask for their multi-factor authentication, login, and download the last 30 days of account history. I sleep quite well at night knowing that it's running from my linux server that only has SSH access.

That's a solid point, a slightly less bad way is having something pop up to remind you to give it the information so that it downloads it for you. It's not as bad, however you still have to be mindful of any portion of the process which isn't secure.

So have the script put said URL in your saved browser session, so that the next time you open the browser you get sent to the page to download the data, with all the appropriate security precautions. This serves as a reminder and takes all the work out of following through on it, but without security problems or complete automation.

The right question is, "What can I do to remember to download it every month?"

Bullshit. That information is about you, it belongs to you, and it really ought to be available by law. The bank gets to set restrictions on how you may communicate with them, it is past time for us to set restrictions on them.

If you care so much about the "information about you", you can download it more than once every three months. They provide you a statement every month. There's no reason why they should be obligated to store this information for you indefinitely.

Some banks do that as an extra service but I think it's preposterous to claim that they should be required to do so by law.

That information is about you but you have no right to have someone else store it for you indefinitely. Download it periodically and store it yourself if it's so important to you. By the way, as far as I know all banks will provide you with sufficient account history information for every normal purpose, such as when buying a house etc.

Banking account history is the basic proof about what/how much the bank owes to him; if they can't provide the history, then they have no claims that the balance is correct.

They may and do charge fees for older history though - but banks are mandated to keep, store and provide accurate info for quite a long time; practices vary between countries, but 5-7 years would be the minimum, if not simply the total life of the account (which might be, say, a 40 year mortgage).

True, but it essentially turns it into essentially a service price issue.If/when banks in USA start considering it as important to competition, they will offer it for free, but AFAIK it (and internet banking features in general) aren't considered as important as elsewhere. I have a feeling that in many countries in Europe or SE-Asia it wouldn't be a concern, as everyone offers it free of charge.

It makes economic sense as well (and I have spent some years in banking IT) - my full financial history, including

True, but it essentially turns it into essentially a service price issue.If/when banks in USA start considering it as important to competition, they will offer it for free,

Yep, that's what I was getting at. The amount of data actually presented to the customer is minuscule, even if it's years of data. The total amount stored on their transactions is much larger, but they can't query all of those records anyway. There's really no reason not to give this data to the customer for years and years. The whole fucking point of online banking is that I don't need any other records. If I can't do all my banking online, then just send me paper like always.

There is no script needed.. Most banks send you a monthly email telling you when the current statement is available,. especially if you have gone "paperless". That the poster who asked the original question, can't be bothered once a month to follow the email he received from the bank and spend a minute or two to download his statement (If it's so important to have it, which I doubt) well.. that's just lazy. And I can guarantee that he probably visits his bank site at least several times a month anyway... Bu

The right question is, "What can I do to remember to download it every month?"

Indeed. Do you do online banking at least once per month? I'm assuming that you're paying some of your recurring bills or transferring funds to your credit cards at least that often; make the download of transaction data a part of that monthly process.

Or set a recurring alarm on your cell phone's calendar, your email client, or what-have-you. If you can't set a three-month recurrence for new reminders, then set them as four annual events at quarterly intervals.

Indeed, the bigger problem is when you start to have multiple accounts across multiple institutions. Downloading from one or two banks isn't that big a deal, but doing it across more gets to be a hassle really quickly.

Yeah, and they'll charge the customer about $100.00 every time the Feds or State requests that information. Then they'll freeze your bank accounts. Then when you ask the Feds or State WTH is up they say, "We didn't tell them to do that, they may have their own policies regarding how they handle such events." You ask the bank and the bank says, "We need a letter from them to allow us to release the funds." Then you finally create a three way call between all the offending parties and they just tell you w

Care to expand on that? I've been with Wells Fargo for 14 years and, having also had accounts (along with my wife) at several other national banks, and a credit union, it's the one I've been consistently happiest with. Just curious what makes Wells Fargo the idiot's choice.

The notion of ATM fees angers me. Banks built and instituted these machines in order to save themselves money because now they don't have to pay a human to hand out cash. For us to pay, in order for them to save money, as asinine.

That is why I bank with USAA, which refunds all ATM fees for any ATM I use, no matter what. As a bonus, they also refund all debit card fees, which is gravy because the stores pay that fee, not me.

All *federal* credit unions are insured by NCUA's share insurance fund. Not all states required state-chartered credit unions to be insured in the same way, though many are, and most are insured in at least some way. It's pretty easy to tell if it's a federal credit union - it usually has the words "federal credit union" (or initials FCU) in the title.

Maybe because they like their bank? Seriously, if you have a Credit Union you like that's great, but people have banks they like too. This idea that banks are mean to all their customers is just false. Many of us have accounts with banks we like. Why go through the trouble of switching, if you are happy with what you have and can't see benefits to a new service?

What's more, the idea that all Credit Unions provide better service is false. Some may, but not all. In particular I've found Credit Unions often fa

Bank industry FUD. Lots of credit unions offer free ATM services to members of other credit unions. So during the time it takes to join a different credit union after you move, you can almost always find local ATMs that will accept transactions.

Digital Federal Credit Union, besides tons of other stellar reasons, handles remote banking wonderfully. For example, shared branching allows pretty much any branch service to be performed at any participating credit union: http://www.cuservicecenter.com/ [cuservicecenter.com] Besides that, up to $10 worth of ATM fees are reimbursed to my account each month.

Their customer service is wonderful to the point that I stay with them even though there are no branches of their credit union in my state. I deposit checks by taking picture

Mint.com is pretty great for connecting to whatever bank you have and it'll download your reports and also automatic categorization. I have almost 2 years of data in it, and they let you download it all CSV. It also has me in the habit of checking all of my accounts once a week, by just logging onto one website. Nice way to be on top of anything that might be fraudulent.

Mint.com is pretty great for connecting to whatever bank you have and it'll download your reports and also automatic categorization. I have almost 2 years of data in it, and they let you download it all CSV. It also has me in the habit of checking all of my accounts once a week, by just logging onto one website. Nice way to be on top of anything that might be fraudulent.

What about the privacy issues of a public web site that tracks a household's entire financial profile? Intuit's claim:

"We make money only when you do - We give you personalized ideas on how to save money by presenting the greatest savings from among thousands of financial products. If you decide to make a change that saves you some cash, we sometimes earn a small fee from the bank or company you switch to. You save a lot; we make a little."

And in the Privacy and Security Policy [mint.com]: "Simply put, we do not and will not sell or rent your personal information to anyone, for any reason, at any time."

But they DO seem to sell your information, as long as the data format can be construed as "anonymous" (before being combined with whatever other datasets the buyer might have):

"Intuit may make anonymous or aggregate personal information and disclose such data only in a non-personally identifiable manner to:

Advertisers and other third parties for their marketing and promotional purposes, such as the number of users who applied for a credit card or how many users clicked on a particular Intuit Offer;

Organizations approved by Intuit that conduct research into consumer spending; [...]

I'd be willing to bet they make a lot from these sales. "You save a lot; we make a little" indeed. Even if Intuit's current intentions are 100% honorable, let's not overlook the ubiquitous "we can change what you agreed to without your consent" clause in the Terms Of Service [mint.com]:

"Intuit may modify this Agreement from time to time. Any and all changes to this Agreement will be posted on the Mint.com site. In addition, the Agreement will always indicate the date it was last revised. You are deemed to accept and agree to be bound by any changes to the Agreement when you use the Service after those changes are posted."

This practice is where all the privacy trouble started with FaceBook. I have no idea how it's legally enforceable, but somehow it is, and in fact it's standard boilerplate for TOS contracts everywhere.:-)

Allows me to pull down statements including transaction histories for the past year in CSV, Quickbooks (on the merchant account), Quicken, txt, and XML. They use another company that handles their web portal, but its' pretty easy to use even if it does look like it was designed for Netscape 4. I download my statements monthly when emailed and review them. Regions also has a decent web portal as well, at least on the business side of things. I've never used them for personal banking.

I have a hard time remembering to pull my transaction history down every three months

A suggestion:

1. Find a calendar program that will remind you when it's time to do things. For example, the google calendar. 2. Program it to nag you every few weeks to download the transaction info from your bank. Make the interval short enough so that you can afford to miss one or two if you're on vacation or utterly absent-minded. 3. When it nags you to do so, download the transaction info... and back it up, of course.

Logging into my bank is not scriptable (or at least, not easily)... They use a virtual keyboard that changes location each time. It's annoying to enter my code word each time, but nice to know that script kiddies can't get into it.

The only problem here being is this requires you to bank with B of A. Anecdotal evidence (as in everyone I know who has any experience with them) strongly suggests you avoid them, and I'll bet there's plenty of quantitative customer surveys to back it up.

you can get anecdotal evidence about any bank sucking. I never had any trouble with B of A. I have noticed a fairly strong correlation between people hating Bank of America and people who fuck up their finances regularly and in spectacular ways, like forgetting that there is a large rent check that hasn't posted, or having an account that can be drawn from by check, debit card, electronic debit and or ATM at the same time.

I can't imagine ever being put into this situation of having to download transaction data FROM a bank. I was taught to write down transactions as they happen and check the bank every month. Over the years I have caught them in several minor errors. I've had several hundred dollars of transactions that never posted, and even a deposit erroneously posted to my account. I rarely attempt to correct these errors on the theory that it would cost us both more to reconcile them than I got in "free" services. (What was with that Las Vegas trip, anyway?) But I did pursue that bad $300 deposit. I did a little invasion of privacy thing, found out who it was, google-earthed his address seeing it was no mansion and thought he might need that $300. It took forever to get through to a real person, but she bird-dogged it thru and got the guy's money back to him.

Today I have several years worth of transactions stored locally and backed up five ways against Sunday all reconciled against the bank records to no more than a month behind.

He asked a technical question to people who might know the answer on a technical blog. I don't see the problem here. Your average non-techie probably doesn't download their bank records, import them into a mysql database and play with the data. A techie might. Finding the bank which meets our technical needs is the sort information you might have trouble finding on other forums.

If on the other hand he asked, what bank has the best savings account interest rate or what banks are compatible with Quicken, then

In addition, some local banks may also offer up to 1 year worth of items online and various download formats. Just call them and ask for a demo or specifically ask about amount of months and what formats are available.

Good question. I'm old enough that I'm in the habit of downloading my info every month (i.e., part of my monthly former balance checkbook/ pay bills by hand process), so it hadn't occurred to wonder how far back it goes.

I use NYCB (New York Community Bank) here in NYC. Turns out I can download stuff from the past 6 months, and it's free. Things I'm not thrilled about with the system: (1) Got hung up when I first applied for online access because they demanded my mother's birthdate and I actually don't know

Let me have your email address and I can send you a MONTHLY reminder to download your transaction CSV data. To pay for this service, all the other days I'll send you some spam.

Better yet, just give me your bank web site, account number, and password, and I'll just download the CSV for you and email it to you. I'll still need your email address, and this extended service will require two spams each day.

So, let me get this straight. You would consider changing banks, and going through all the pain associated with changing direct deposits, ordering new checks or a debit card, going online to change any websites you had your bills tied to your old account, all because you can't seem to manage to put a reminder in one of your 17 electronic devices to remind you to do something once every three months?

In particular because even if you switch, who's to say that bank doesn't change their policies? Maybe you go to a bank that currently maintains 10 years of records. However they audit things and find out nobody accesses anything older than a year. So to save space they archive everything over a year old to tape and take it offline. If you were relying on it you are now SOL and probably have to pay them a fee to get the tapes and drag up your old data (banks almost always have it and can get you a copy, it c

I use both Bank of America's online 'my portfolio' and Mint.com to track my long-term finances. Both allow you to connect to different accounts, there are built-in reports, budgeting, cool charts and graphs, and 'net worth' features.

I think BoA's service doesn't seem to reach back in time as far as Mint.

I can see back at least 2 years using Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. At the end of the year I just download everything in CSV format for my taxes. The last time I did it, it was kind of hard for me to find the CSV option on the website but I found it. I think it was called "Excel" format on the site, but it was actually CSV.

Is there some reason why your bank offers such a poor history of your transactions? It's not like it's hard for them to implement, several years of history for the average customer should be no more than a few hundred KB using decent compression so storage and retrieval shouldn't be an issue.

My bank, Nat West (UK) provides me with 7 years of transactions online which I can easily copy and paste into a spreadsheet. They're obliged to keep 6 years' worth and even if your bank doesn't make them available onlin

This is your make or break bank feature? Just don't be lazy and check it once a month. I do mine via Quicken about every weekend to two weeks, just 'cos. It takes about 5 minutes, and I have transactions going back to 2001. Easy peasy. (substitute your program of choice to do the same exact thing)

Quickbooks now allows you to download transactions, semi-automatically (you have to go through them and edit them, in some cases, so you know what was the transaction was for.
Then, export the data from Quickbooks for further analysis.
Ever since Quickbooks added the "download transactions" functionality, my bank accounts are NEVER out of balance in my records, monthly reconciliation typically takes me 3-5 minutes/month/account, and (because I use "Memo" fields extensively), I can always search for a part

I'm not sure about banks, but I like the way that AMEX and paypal do it. Amex offers an end of year update, in csv or excel formats, along with a paper format. So, that's once a year, with a nice reminder. Paypal lets you run a report for an entire year, in csv form, and also allows filters for different types of transactions.

Yes, this is how banks should do it... It would be a nice feature for one that would offer it.

Those are the three banks I use, and all three are different. USBank is only 90 days, Schwab is two years, and PNC goes back to January 2006 (provided you get online statements, otherwise it's three months). PNC also seems to have the most versatile export utility - it can export data in Quicken, Quickbooks, MS Money, or CSV formats, though I've never used any but CSV. Schwab only uses CSV.

Three months is plenty! Set up a calendar app to REMIND you to do the download. Set the reminder monthly. Do it when you pay your bills for crying out loud.

Look, I KNOW it is hard to remember stuff like that. I'm just about the worst about it having forgotten my own birthday more than twice. (And it's not like my birthday is hard to remember -- it's the first of a month!) But since I got a Blackberry and started setting calendar entries for important things and reminders, I've been much better off. I

I have a hard time remembering to pull my transaction history down every three months

Try Google Calendar. It'll even send you an email reminder.

If you've got a longstanding relationship with a bank, and they've been doing a good job but the only problem is you can't remember to download your transaction history every three months, it seems to me it would be easier just to get a reminder every three months to press the little button that downloads the transactions.

My bank is similar when it comes to CSV/QIF/OFX files, only 90 days of history. But they have years of online statements in pdf format. Recently I got behind on my imports, and found that pdftotext and a little perl was all I needed to create.qifs from the pdf statements..csv should be easier.

...remembering to do it yourself is the best option. I'm not going to tell you how to manage your finances, but if you can go so much as three months without knowing any of your account history, it probably isn't that valuable to you. I recommend keeping a running ledger (JGnash2 can do it for you, and it has pre-defined queries you can run on it in ways that will far exceed a simple MySQL database unless you categorize your transations--which, given your rate of downloading, is fairly unlikely).

I second this idea. Not only are you supporting a locally owned business, but they're also supporting other locally owned businesses. And as a member, you can often get good rates for loans. Also, they're not responsible for all the financial woes in the USA. Well, OK, that last part is speculation, but it does sound good...

I'll give a big Fuck You to my former credit union (Educational Systems Employees FCU in DC/MD - http://www.esfcu.org/ [esfcu.org]). I was a member for over 20 years (going back to childhood - my first savings account) but was just given the boot last month after not enrolling in the government re-regulated courtesy pay program.

My parents - members for over 35 years iirc (both teachers for whom the whole CU was built to serve) - also got notices of intent to boot for not enrolling in the courtesy pay program. I've lo